Friday, January 21, 2011

And Just Who Are More Likely to Smoke Pot, Anyway, Conservatives or Liberals?

Look, we understood we could not make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it.

John EhrlichmanNixon White House Assistant to the President for Domestic AffairsQuoted in Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors (1997)

Similarly, opium Prohibition was initiated as an anti-Chinese measure in the US in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and marijuana and cocaine Prohibition as an anti-black measure in the 1930s—although jobs did of course have to be found for the boys from the Prohibition Bureau . . . .